Christmas Wreaths for Three
by luvsanime02
Summary: One-shot. Sometimes, Hermione felt so very small compared to Harry Potter.


**Disclaimer: **The Harry Potter series belongs to JK Rowling. I'm making no profit off of this fic.

**AN: **Rated K for general audiences. This was actually written a while ago, nowhere near the holidays, but I held off on publishing it until it was edited.

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**Christmas Wreaths for Three** by luvsanime02

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Sometimes, Hermione felt so very small compared to Harry Potter.

And not because he was _the _Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, the Chosen One, Undesirable Number One, or whatever ridiculous moniker the Wizarding world wanted to anoint him with that week. Hermione had read the history books that told of a toddler with amazing powers, that no one seemed to know how to properly describe, and how he had saved the entire British magical community from a reign of terror that had lasted eleven years.

Then she'd met a boy on the train who looked unbelievably small in overlarge clothes and ripped trainers and Sellotaped glasses, and seen the lightning bolt scar on his forehead, and understood for the first time that the character she'd read about in those books was a real person. As nervous as she'd been, Hermione hadn't felt small in his presence at all that day.

Classes started, and she was just as clever while learning magic as she'd been concerning science and maths, and just as hated for it, and she'd been so c_rushed_ all over again. Hermione would lie on her comfy bed at night, crying softly into her pillow, thinking bitterly back to her primary school days when she'd dreamed of meeting others who were as different as she was and finally being accepted. Her letter had come, and she'd been so, ever so, happy, thinking that her magic had been the reason for their cruelty, the way her classmates had seemed to almost automatically shun her. The realization that it really _was_ her, that there was something about her specifically that caused Hermione to still be friendless, had made her stomach clench hard into a ball of defeat.

Then one day her back was to a wall, her eyes almost swollen shut for crying, and that was how Hermione had thought she was going to die, snot on her skirt and head pounding. The arrival of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley hadn't even registered right away through her horror. The arm tugging frantically on hers might as well have been a gentle breeze for all the attention she paid it. And then Harry's arms were around a troll's neck, and Ron was performing the spell from their Charms class brilliantly, and suddenly it was unconscious. Before she had quite registered that everything was safe, the professors had shown up. She'd taken a look around the room, as though seeing it for the first time, registered Ron frozen and Harry looking cornered, and tried to take in a deep breath before stumbling forward. The two boys had rescued her, and now she would rescue them, and she'd quailed at the disappointment from her favorite professor and the loss of house points but it hadn't stopped her from feeling so very tall all of the sudden.

And from there, the things Hermione had done with, and for, Harry had just escalated. Setting a professor's robes on fire turned into smuggling a dragon out of the school, and then to answering a complicated, yet fascinating, riddle. The next year it was stealing from a professor, and lying to another, and then, most distressing, actually ripping a page out of a library book. The following years blurred into breaking promises to others, breaking the _law_, and hippogriffs and dragons and thestrals, of all things. Even further, to saving each other's lives in battle, to keeping secrets just between the two of them, and to even more stealing. That time, no matter how much she'd professed it wasn't, from one of the greatest Wizards of her time.

She'd erased her parents' memories. She'd said she'd stay.

No, there were too many moments, days, years, and adventures in their shared past for Hermione to feel small or unimportant standing beside Harry Potter in the face of the unknown. But this-

Hermione's hand is shaking ever so slightly as she raises her wand, the incantation flashing through her mind with no conscious thought directed toward its existence, and Harry catches the wreath as it materializes. There's snow in her hair, and her toes are numb, have been for weeks now, and even disguised with Polyjuice she feels so exposed.

It could be her, next year, staring at names on a white grave and unable to feel her mother's arms wrapped around her ever again, and something in Hermione chills further, maybe even further down than a Dementor can reach, because that's not the worst thought.

She could be standing _here_, all alone, with no grave to mourn over but coming back to this place anyway, and how ridiculous is it that the thought of standing here a year from now, but with Harry no longer beside her, is what finally causes the tears to brim in her eyes?

Harry kneels down to place the wreath gently against cold marble, and done, now stands beside her. And she's never felt so alone, facing the awful possibility of an endless future of Christmas wreaths for three and no one to stand next to her. There would just be an empty space instead of his warm presence.

Hermione reaches for him; her arm wraps itself around his waist, tightens, and she feels his own arm settle just as tightly around her shoulders, and wonders what he thinks of her shivers, if he can hear her teeth chattering in fright at the sight of that whiteness before them and what future it could represent.

Whenever Hermione thinks of the possibility of a future without Harry Potter standing beside her, shoulder to shoulder, she feels so very vulnerably small.


End file.
